SCOTT CITY, Kan. (AP) - Voters in a western Kansas groundwater management district have rejected a six-year plan to reduce irrigation pumping from the Ogallala Aquifer by 20 percent.

The proposal by the board of Groundwater Management District No. 1 would have created the state’s second Local Enhanced Management Area, a mechanism created by a 2012 state law specifically to prolong the life of the critical aquifer.

Such management areas can be established without a public vote, but officials of the five-county district opted to put the question to water rights holders and property owners and to require its approval by a two-thirds majority.

But the final count from a weeklong election that began June 9 was 173 opposed and 158 - slightly less than half - in favor, The Hutchinson News reported (http://bit.ly/1lS6rwg ).

The proposal won in Lane, Scott and Wichita counties but lost by one vote in Greely County and by 31 in Wallace County.

“I am somewhat disappointed, yes,” said longtime Scott City farmer Bob Hoeme, the Scott County representative on the groundwater management district board. “I thought it would be closer to passing than that.”

The district has suffered some of the state’s heaviest depletion from the aquifer.

“We are trying to buy some years on the tail end of the irrigating process - try to buy a little more time,” Hoeme, who farms in Scott County, said. “Maybe we can spread the transition period over more years.”

Hoeme said his own wells are only pumping at 60 percent of what they did when he took them over in the 1970s. He said in April that rather than following a state mandate, “we are attempting to do something on our own.”

Local Enhanced Management Areas are intended to bring landowners together to coordinate conservation of the aquifer while meeting local needs. The concept was championed by Gov. Sam Brownback, who has said the Ogallala will be 70 percent depleted within decades if current practices continue.